Q&A | Liza Johnson: Ohio roots have helped filmmaker of 'Return'

For her first feature film, Liza Johnson tapped her Ohio roots. Johnson, a New York resident, grew up in southern Ohio and, in 1988, graduated from Portsmouth High School.

Ken Gordon, The Columbus Dispatch

For her first feature film, Liza Johnson tapped her Ohio roots.

Johnson, a New York resident, grew up in southern Ohio and, in 1988, graduated from Portsmouth High School.

The artist and art professor at Williams College in Williamstown, Mass., has worked on several short videos — most recently In the Air, about young people in the Cirque d’Art program in Portsmouth.

Her career took a big leap forward with the recent release of Return, a 97-minute independent feature that she wrote and directed.

The film, which hasn’t had a commercial run in central Ohio, will be screened Thursday, March 1 at the Wexner Center for the Arts.

Set in a small Ohio town, Return takes a sobering look at a female veteran’s difficult transition to civilian life after her service in the Middle East. Favorably reviewed by most New York and Los Angeles critics, it stars Linda Cardellini (Freaks and Geeks, ER).

Johnson, 41, talked recently about the movie.

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Q: What inspired you to tackle your subject?

A: I definitely feel like there is a big gap between our military and civilian culture. A friend of mine came back from deployment and told me an intimate story of his efforts to stay married.

In the civilian culture, most of the stories we hear about wars are told in a different way — about statistics.

I felt like there was an absence of that kind of intimate account, and it started me on this path. I did not feel this type of story should be unfamiliar or uncommon.

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Q: The character of Kelli (Cardellini) seems to have returned home damaged, doesn’t she?

A: She certainly doesn’t have a lot of patience for things that everyone else regards as normal, but I don’t know if there’s something wrong with her.

Most people I talked to who had left active military duty felt that that had been a time where they felt a strong sense of purpose and they had to find that again.

For some people, that doesn’t take very long; but, for some people, it takes a really long time. I set the whole movie in that in-between zone.

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Q: Return was shot in Newburgh, N.Y. — not Portsmouth?

A: Newburgh actually is a lot like Portsmouth — an industrial river town. In In the Air, the kids in that movie were full of their own sense of possibility and imagining their future.

For this film to work, you have to imagine that the world works both ways. You have to feel like some of the stuff in everyday life is exuberant. But then you flip into Kelli’s perspective, and you say, “Wait a second: Why is there not enough meaningful work here?” You have to see her world both for its joys and the ways it fails people. If it seemed that her world was only crappy, that would not make a good movie, because that’s not an accurate reflection of how people live.

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Q: What do you hope people glean from the movie?

A: I hope they take an interest in her story and feel the phenomenon (of returning from deployment) in a different way than they’re used to feeling it. I believe that, if we feel things in a different way, that enables us to develop different kinds of thoughts and ideas.